The popularity of the recent crop of military histories, however, has provoked a certain amount of sniping between the journalists and the professionals. The latter make four major charges against the journalists. First, they allege, the journalists too often fail adequately to acknowledge their debt to the scholars’ work; secondly, the journalists’ sensational ‘discoveries’ are often points that have long been known, and sometimes debunked, by the professionals; thirdly, the popular appeal of the journalists’ work too often comes at the cost of dumbing down complex events; and, finally, all too often they simply don’t ‘get it right’, on either facts or arguments.

For their part, the journalists retort that the professionals are jealously possessive of ‘their’ special subjects; that they spend too much time analysing minutiae, in clotted, theory-laden prose, at the expense of vigorous and colourful narrative; and that they give too much credence to manipulative politicians, devious diplomats, bungling generals, and treacherous protesters, when the real subject is the personal experience and heroism of the individual soldier amid the horrors of battle.

But the journalists’ most powerful counter-attack is to point to the sales figures. The popular books sell in tens of thousands – The Great War has reportedly sold more than 100,000 copies – while the scholars’ tomes, with few exceptions, struggle towards one or two thousand sales, mostly to fellow academics or to university libraries. Who cares about academic nit-picking while the cash registers ring?

Paul Ham, already the author of a deservedly successful book on the Kokoda campaign (2004), now takes this genre into the more controversial arena of the Vietnam War with Vietnam: The Australian war. Other freelance writers have previously written on Vietnam, but the scale and impact of this book mark an important stage in the process by which Australia’s third largest military commitment in the twentieth century is becoming incorporated into the mainstream of Australian history.

Sales of the book, which was published in time for the Christmas stampede, have apparently justified the promotional efforts of author and publisher. Vietnam has many of the characteristics that earn commercial success. The large book, with the prominent, one-word title, promises a comprehensive and detailed account. The subtitle and the cover photograph, showing an Australian soldier leading a South Vietnamese patrol, make the central focus clear.

Like Ham’s book on Kokoda, which many professionals regard as the best of the popular treatments of the New Guinea campaign in 1942, Vietnam is shaped as a large number (in this case forty-nine) of short, tightly written chapters. Each is a mostly self-contained essay, so the book can be read like a series of feature articles in a quality newspaper. Ham, who is the Australian correspondent for the London Sunday Times, has the skilled journalist’s ability to use an apt quotation to make his argument. His style is clear, vigorous, and vernacular, without descending into the gratuitous slang of some other writers in this genre. Ham makes it easy to read the large and detailed book as a whole or to refer to a particular topic.

Ham knows what the Australian reader wants from a book on military history. The central focus is on the perspective of the individual digger, gleaned from personal interviews as well as diaries and letters. While not uncritical, a constant theme is the Australians’ courage and military competence, which wins the respect of a formidable foe, whereas our great ally has to rely on numbers, technology, and firepower. The Australian soldier’s tactical skill is, implicitly or explicitly, contrasted with the strategic incompetence of his military and political superiors, and especially that of the Americans. These are themes of which Australian readers seldom tire.

No one can accuse Ham of obscuring his debt to his sources. The 814-page book includes sixty-six pages of endnotes and a 31-page bibliography. The latter includes extensive references to archival sources, in both Australia and the United States, but a much better guide to the nature of the book is in the extensive list of interviews and discussions with veterans and civilians, mostly Australian but also American and Vietnamese. Ham has even listed the unit reunions he has attended in Australia and New Zealand. In his archival research, Ham has concentrated on the personal papers of veterans held at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, while he has relied on the books of earlier writers, including those written by my colleagues and myself in the official history, for much of the context. The centrality of the soldiers’ experience is so strong that the subtitle might well have been ‘the Australian soldiers’ war’. Much of this is highly commendable. Presumably, Ham’s aim was to write an accessible account through which the general reader could not only understand the soldier’s experience but also benefit from much scholarly research and writing. It could have been a five-star performance. But it is marred by signs that the book was rushed into print, with insufficient attention to facts, issues, and sources.

Ham refers, for example, to the major change in official policy towards the bodies of Australians killed in action, from burial overseas to repatriation to Australia, but he gets the occasion of this change, and the identity of the fallen Australian, wrong. The error probably comes from an over-hasty reading of the relevant passage in Ian McNeill’s To Long Tan (1993).

On two occasions – once in the text, once in an endnote – I am wrongly named as the author of a quoted passage. Some slips like these are almost inevitable, but their recurrence has the effect of the proverbial thirteenth chime of the clock, casting doubt on all that has gone before.

At several points, the reader is left with the impression that Ham’s views reflect those of the particular soldiers to whom he has spoken, or those who have expressed their opinions most pungently. Sometimes he seems unaware of the various mini-controversies within the overall Vietnam debate. In other cases, he seems to have included a long endnote on an important point that should have been included in the text. Most of the endnotes are restricted to citing sources, which gives the impression that Ham became aware of the issue late in the book’s preparation.

The sense of ‘getting it right’ is less assured the further Ham gets from the personal experience of the soldier. Several historians, for example, have debated aspects of the policy-making that led to the Australian commitment, including the role of Indonesia in Australia’s strategic thinking and the respective roles of senior politicians (notably Robert Menzies, Garfield Barwick, and Paul Hasluck), the diplomats of the Department of External Affairs, the chiefs of the armed forces, and civilian officials in key departments. Ham’s treatment of these questions suggests that he simply does not grasp the issues involved. For instance, one diplomatic cable, cited in several books, refers to Australia’s hopes that a military commitment in Vietnam would ‘pick up a lot of credit’ in Washington. It was clearly a reference to strategic credit, with the Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation at the front of Australian minds, but Ham puts it into the context of trade negotiations.

Even the dedication of the book, ‘to the Australian servicemen and women – and their families – who fought this politicians’ war’, seems to have been written with more haste than thought. Does he really mean that the families fought the war, or rather that they suffered collateral damage? And why was Vietnam a ‘politicians’ war’? Every decision to go to war, whether in a democracy or dictatorship, is made by politicians. The question is whether they decided wisely, with sufficient cause to warrant putting their country’s forces in harm’s way. In this case, it is an issue that deserves a more carefully considered discussion than it receives here. Perhaps surprisingly, the final assessment, of winners and losers, is better argued than the early chapters.

Politicians from all major parties are generally deprecated as venal, deceitful, incompetent, or ignorant. The two chapters on John Gorton in Washington, based on Ham’s research in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Texas, are especially colourful. But why does Ham describe Edward St John’s criticisms of Gorton as ‘persecution’, when St John was essentially saying what Ham evidently believes – that Gorton’s behaviour was quite inappropriate for a prime minister?

Ham’s determination to empathise with the soldiers leads him with little sympathy for other participants, either in the war itself or in the domestic debate. The fighting was overwhelmingly an infantryman’s war, but Ham could have given a little more acknowledgment to the Air Force, the Navy, and other corps within the Army.

Ham is right to stress that the war fought by Australian soldiers had little in common with the war debated on the home front, but that does not entirely justify his treatment of the anti-war protesters. According to Ham, the soldiers hated all protesters, and rightly so. The unionists who held up postal and other supplies are put alongside the naïve students and the middle-aged mums led by Dr Jim Cairns, who thought the Viet Cong were genuine rural revolutionaries in the South, not the tools of Hanoi’s authoritarian dictatorship. The stories of returning soldiers being accused of being ‘babykillers’ and demeaned by world war veterans in RSL sub-branches are retailed at some length.

These accounts are overdone. They blur the distinction between what were two fairly clear sections of the protest movement: those who simply wanted to end Australian involvement, especially by conscripts; and those who wanted to use anti-war protests to undermine the institutions of capitalist democracy. Those who spat on returning soldiers and called them ‘babykillers’ behaved contemptibly, but they were far outnumbered by those who, for a variety of reasons, simply wanted Australia out of the war.

War and Words: The Australian press and the Vietnam war by Trish Payne
                                        MUP, $49.95 pb, 351 pp 

Although a journalist himself, Ham does not make heroes of his own profession, quoting Denis Warner’s reference to the large number of ‘impostors and charlatans’ among war correspondents. Nevertheless, Ham is right to argue that the media did not lose the war, as they tended to follow rather than to lead public opinion. And Ham’s chapter on the media is certainly easier to read than Trish Payne’s War and Words, a detailed analysis, based on her doctoral thesis, of Australian press reporting of several major stories during the war. Payne’s conclusion is that the media, far from being ‘the enemy within’, was heavily influenced by the government of the day. Students of the media in war-time will welcome this study of the various techniques used by governments, in the days before we all spoke of ‘spin doctors’. But Ham, the journalist, has written a much livelier account than Payne, the lecturer in political communication.

In all, Ham’s book will serve well as a popular guide to the Australian war in Vietnam, especially as that war was experienced by individual Australian soldiers. But it could have been so much better if Ham had taken a little more care in his research and if – like Michael Caulfield in writing The Vietnam Years (2007) – he had asked a professional historian to check his manuscript before publication. The combination of the journalist’s facility with words and the professional’s concern for accuracy would have made a formidable combination.

Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965
                                        CUP, $59.95 pb, 512 pp 

One professional historian’s account of the American war presents a very different picture. Many Australians and Americans were surprised when President George W. Bush recently cited the Vietnam War in defending his Iraq policies. After all, for some years after 2003, much of the public debate had been between those opponents of the Iraq commitment who said that it was turning into another Vietnam-like quagmire – wrong war, wrong time, wrong place, wrong enemy – and the Bush administration’s supporters who insisted that Iraq and Vietnam were quite different.

Now, it seemed, Bush had turned the Iraq–Vietnam comparison on its head. But this apparent backflip was based partly on the changes in attitude towards the Vietnam war, especially in the United States. What Mark Moyar calls the orthodox view, which sees American involvement in Vietnam as completely wrong-headed and probably unjust, has been challenged by the revisionist school, which interprets the war as noble but badly executed. Taking heart from President Ronald Reagan’s description of the war as ‘a noble cause’, the revisionist approach to Vietnam resonates well with the Bush administration’s desire to portray Iraq as another noble cause that has been vitiated by poor implementation, rather than a totally ill-advised strategic misadventure.

The revisionist view of Vietnam is not new. It has had important academic, political, and military supporters since the late 1970s. Its crudest form is what Ham refers to as the ‘woulda – shoulda – coulda’ school, as in: ‘We coulda won; we shoulda (insert tactical remedy of choice, from improved counter-insurgency techniques to using nuclear weapons); then we woulda had Hanoi pleading for mercy by (insert date of choice).’

Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam war, 1954–1965 is a highly sophisticated and scholarly version of this approach. He comes with high academic credentials. A BA graduate summa cum laude from Harvard and a PhD from Cambridge, he is now an associate professor at the US Marine Corps University in Virginia. The book is based on prodigious research in both archives and published books, indicated by the endnotes, which occupy eighty-nine pages of small type. (Regrettably, there is no bibliography.) Of most interest to the experts in the field, he has made substantial use of communist histories and archival sources.

This book takes the story of the American commitment from the origins of the war to the major American commitment in 1965. A second volume will deal with the conduct of the war itself from 1965 to the withdrawal in the early 1970s.

The entire book – like, we may safely presume, its successor – is not a mere chronicle but a long, sustained, and vigorously argued case for the revisionist approach and rebuttal of the historical orthodoxy. The first chapter, for example, covers Vietnamese history up to the Geneva Agreements of 1954. The orthodox line is that the Vietnamese people had a long sense of national identity and unity, fostered by successive battles against would-be invaders, especially successive Chinese régimes, long before the French arrived.

Moyar argues, by contrast, that the Vietnamese were as likely to be fighting each other as against outsiders; that it was as normal for Vietnam to be divided into two or three parts as to be united; and that Ho Chi Minh, like many Vietnamese before him, greatly admired and emulated the Chinese, especially fellow communists. (Moyar notes that Ho’s famous statement, that he would rather sniff French shit for a little while than eat Chinese shit all his life, was made when the Nationalists ruled most of China.) Moyar bluntly dismisses the idea that Ho could have been an Asian Tito, an independent, anti-Chinese communist.

From here, Moyar turns to one of the principal themes of the book: that the United States made a huge error in conniving at the removal from power of Ngo Dinh Diem. According to Moyar, Diem’s authoritarianism was well suited to an Asian society. His critics, especially those within the State Department, were therefore profoundly misguided to point constantly to his political failings, as measured by Western standards. Diem, Moyar argues, partly on the basis of communist sources, was actually doing well at the time of his downfall and assassination in 1963, having recovered from a slump in performance in 1960–61. Moyar’s approach to Diem’s authoritarianism has little in common with President Bush’s assertion that democracy is not God’s gift to America, it is God’s gift to the world. It is more in keeping with the saying attributed to President Johnson: ‘He may be a sonofabitch but he is our sonofabitch.’

From there Moyar turns to the political and military advice given to Johnson in the early years of his presidency. Essentially, his argument is that Johnson was right to take the fear of ‘falling dominoes’ seriously, but wrong to allow his military actions to be constrained by fear of China and fear of alienating liberal opinion in the United States and across the world.

Like the young Marine Corps officers he teaches, Moyar believes in direct, vigorous, and unapologetic confrontation with his opponents. He roundly denounces many of those who are held to be heroes by the orthodox view, including journalists such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, diplomats and officials such as Henry Cabot Lodge, Roger Hilsman, and Averell Harriman, and dissident soldiers such as John Paul Vann. In Moyar’s view, the militant Buddhists, whose actions (including a famous self-immolation) in 1963 did much to precipitate the massive American involvement, were wrong-headed, unfair in their charges against the Diem régime, and probably communist-influenced. (It is easy to imagine Burma’s military junta agreeing wholeheartedly with this account.)

Australians will be interested in Moyar’s treatment of the regional context, and especially the domino theory. While most of the book concentrates on events in Saigon, Hanoi and Washington, one chapter discusses in some detail the positions of several countries in the region. This is a valuable inclusion, making a point too often omitted from American histories of the war, especially those of the orthodox school. Moyar’s references to Australia and New Zealand, in common with most of the rest of the book, are accurate and substantial, but clearly selected to support his general argument. He makes much more of the anti-communism of the Thais and the Indonesian generals.

Moyar’s book has provoked considerable discussion and controversy among American diplomatic historians. As one naturally inclined in most debates to seek the middle of the road, I welcome the book as a major contribution to the scholarly study of the war, while finding it difficult to accept all of Moyar’s arguments, or to take them as far as he does. It is a strong barrister’s case, rather than a balanced, judicious assessment.

As recorded in this and many other accounts of American policy, President John Kennedy sent a two-man mission to Vietnam in September 1963, to assess progress. They reported together to Kennedy and his senior officials. The Marine Corps general, Victor Krulak, having visited American advisers and South Vietnamese officers throughout South Vietnam, reported that the war was going well. The State Department diplomat, Joseph Mendenhall, having spoken to American and South Vietnamese officials in three cities, reported that the political situation was poisonous with a high risk of failure. Kennedy quipped: ‘The two of you did visit the same country, didn’t you?’ Most historians of the Vietnam war have visited Mendenhall’s country; Moyar has visited Krulak’s. This book is a welcome reminder that, for almost every assertion about that most ambiguous of wars, it is possible to say ‘Yes, but on the other hand …’ That fact will keep historians of the Vietnam war, whether journalists or professionals, Australians or Americans, in business for many years yet.